Adding a ToolWindow to an IntelliJ Plugin

A Beginner’s Guide

I’ve always been interested in creating my own plugins for Android Studio, and more recently IntelliJ IDEA, but I didn’t give it a try until recently. I’ve been working on a tool called Flutter Architect that’s designed to help you accomplish repetitive tasks in Flutter a little faster — things like building nested widgets, wrapping widgets with a single click, and reusing various types of snippets.

Banjoe 💙 on Twitter: “#Flutter Architect v1 is out! I built a developer tool using #GithubCopilot to make Flutter development even faster. — Quickly build nested widgets — Click to copy common snippets — Create multi-child layouts https://t.co/sbzBpKVigx" / Twitter

When I posted V1 to Twitter, the response was very positive but more than half of the comments were asking for the app in an IDE plugin. I couldn’t blame them for wanting that because I wanted it too.

So here we are! In this series of articles I am going to recreate as much of the functionality from the Flutter Architect app as I can:

• Click-to-copy code snippets
• Widget library
• Widget nesting tool
• Saving widgets

In this article specifically, I will be laying out the steps to add a simple tool window to an IntelliJ plugin.

Getting Oriented